The invisible and mysterious personage who had, as I supposed, so pertinaciously haunted the door of my chambers, was a large, heavy man, employed as a porter in a shop near Temple Bar. His wife was a respectable laundress, who, unknown to me, occupied the basement of the house. The entrance hall was rather dark, and as I had just taken possession, I had not observed a narrow passage which, by proceeding a few steps beyond the foot of the stairs leading up, led to a staircase going down, having exactly the same number of steps, and, in consequence of the whole staircase from bottom to top being a species of conductor, the sound of footsteps going down was conveyed up so perfectly, that to any one sitting in my rooms it was impossible for the nicest ear to tell, whether the person was coming up or going down; and the floor of the basement being of brick, the sound was lost the moment it was trodden on.
I was perfectly dumb-foundered when I saw the big fellow pass quietly by me without taking the least notice; and I felt a mighty inclination for a fight, in consequence of his having so cruelly disappointed and mocked my determined belief in a ghost. But, like Mr. Van Buren, “sober second thought,” induced me to retrace my steps, and walk quietly up stairs, somewhat like a president walking down, when he is unexpectedly turned to the right-about. My Andrea Ferrara was hung upon its peg, from which it was never afterward removed, during all the unhappy years I afterwards passed as a Templar in those old-fashioned rooms. What reminiscences do they not now revive?
The vexatious annoyances to which my friend, Mr. Crofton, was so long subjected, arose from an admirably concocted scheme of female waggery, in which a youth bore a principal part; but to render its details intelligible, it is, as formerly hinted, necessary to digress a little into history.
In the year 1794, during the frenzy excited by the French Revolution, when every throne in Europe was shaken to its centre, a society was formed in London for the pretended reform, although it was in fact for the overthrow of the English Government.
It was called the London Corresponding Society for Constitutional Reform, and it was in secret correspondence with Robespierre, and other monsters of that terrible tribunal which never spared, until it had deluged France with the blood of 1,022,351 of its best citizens. Start not, reader, in doubt, there is no mistake in the figures—ONE MILLION, TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND, THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-ONE victims, male and female, adults and children, perished under the axe of the accursed guillotine, or other wholesale murders, perpetrated during the Reign of Terror.
May its bloody horrors be a lesson and A WARNING to nations, in all future time, to beware or the perils attending MOB LAW!
The London Corresponding Society was headed by Hardy, Horne Tooke, Thelwall, and other turbulent spirits of the time. But by the firmness of the Prime Minister, William Pitt, son of the Earl of Chatham, the leaders were apprehended in their own homes, during the night, and tried for high treason. But the society, although with greater privacy, still held its sittings, and in order to defeat the government police, one of its agents hired two houses adjoining each other, where, with extraordinary care and secrecy, a secret passage was constructed between the two, by means of closets, so artfully contrived, that at a moment’s warning the members could escape with their papers from one house to the other, and elude the chance of capture.
In the room where the traitors met, the back of the closet was built up of bricks, resting on strong shelves, which were fixed to a door of strong plank. This door, with its shelves and brick back, swung on well oiled pivots. The bricks were whitewashed, and were firmly attached to the shelves, which were furnished with China and crockery, coated with fine dust, to make it appear, on looking into the closet, as if it had not been opened for a long time.